Study: "Megadrought" The New Normal In The West

This tower in a ponderosa pine forest near Sisters, Ore., gathers data on forest productivity and soil processes that influence the carbon dioxide and water vapor exchange with the atmosphere.

Beverly Law

The drought that hit the West from 2000-2004 is not only the worst in 800 years, but it could be the new “normal." That’s according to new research in the journal Nature Geoscience.

You’d have to go back to the middle ages to find a period as dry as 2000-2004 in the American West. Snowpack decreased. Crop productivity in much of the west went down by 5 percent. And that’s not the worst of it, the researchers say. Grasses, plants and trees suck up about 30 percent of our CO2 emissions in North America. In the Northwest, that percentage is even higher.

Beverly Law: "The forests do a pretty good job but in the drought year, that was reduced to about half because they were suffering from the drought so much."

Law is a professor of global change biology at Oregon State University. She says drought compounds our CO2 emissions problem. More CO2 in the atmosphere means more drought. And more drought means the trees and plants are less able to suck up our CO2 emissions.

Law says that as we continue to depend on fossil fuels, things aren’t looking any better.

Law: “This is what it could be like into the future and we can only handle so many large events that cause harm to people’s livelihoods, vegetation, animals – the things we rely on.”

Climate models predict that 80 out of the next 95 years will be just as dry as the 2000-2004 drought period.